by Mark Adams
Removing the numbers alleviated the headache of accounting for checkerboard canals that supposedly covered an area as large as Nebraska, but it didn’t bring me any closer to understanding their purpose in the Atlantis story. Tony reminded me that Critias pauses to comment on how unrealistic Solon’s measurements seem—I know this may sound crazy!—and his skepticism indicates this piece of information really did come from Egypt, since such doubt would otherwise make Plato’s book less believable. The channel’s perimeter totals ten thousand stades, or a myriad, the largest number for which Greeks of Plato’s time had a written character. Perhaps Solon’s assistant was using shorthand. Or maybe Rainer Kühne was right, and Plato was making a math-nerd joke. The canals remain an aporia.
Erasing the canals and numbers from my list of clues felt so satisfying, like a thorough spring cleaning, that I couldn’t resist hunting for other criteria to purge. Skimming through the various location hypotheses, I noticed that many of the identifying details in Plato’s story are so common throughout the world known to the Athenians as to be almost useless in identifying a single location. Hot and cold springs, tricolored stone, and relics from ancient bull ceremonies are almost as common around the coastal Mediterranean as middle-aged men in Speedos. (Admittedly, Santorini has a slight quantitative advantage in all four categories.) Other descriptions Plato used seem of relatively minor importance—he may have employed terms such as triremes or chariots to describe less sophisticated war machines. The meaning of Atlantis being “greater than Libya and Asia put together” is uncertain enough to strike from the record, and the definition of nesos as any sort of land that touches water, rather than a solitary island, is so broad as to be almost meaningless.
Once I’d scrubbed away several layers of Atlantean chaff, I had a brief moment of panic. How big a kernel of truth remained? To my relief, I saw the outlines of a pretty big one.
The Athens half of Plato’s story—the physical description of the Bronze Age city, the earthquake that blocked the springs on the Acropolis, the loss of literacy—rings historically true. Plato could not have invented so many accurate details. In fact, as the historian Eric Cline demonstrates in his recent book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, the rapid, well-documented end of the Late Bronze Age throughout the eastern Mediterranean coincided with a near-simultaneous “‘perfect storm’ of calamities”: famines, drought, climate change, and a fifty-year-long series of earthquake storms caused by an unstable fault line slowly “unzipping” as it released pressure. The whole region, including Athens, was shaken up, figuratively and literally.
The year 1177 BC is when the Sea Peoples, probably driven from their homelands by this convergence of disasters, launched their second and more devastating invasion of Egypt. Since the kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean were interconnected by the sort of trade seen in the cargo of the Uluburun wreck, word would have filtered back to Egypt that the same swarms of mysterious attackers who had been repulsed by Ramses III had annihilated some of its commercial partners. This information could have been twisted—by Plato, Solon, the Saïs priest, or some earlier Egyptian chronicler—into a tale of a mighty naval power attacking from a land far, far away. (This was the period when the Greeks were tinkering with the transition from myth to a radical new information technology, recorded history.) Assuming that Solon really did visit the temple at Saïs—and it seems to me he did—it’s logical that a fascinating war story chronicled by an esteemed ancestor would have been passed down through the generations to Plato.
As I sifted again through the various possibilities for the Pillars of Heracles, their location came into sharper focus. Unless the Pillars that Critias described were a metaphor for the end of the known world, they were almost certainly the Strait of Gibraltar. Herodotus describes the Pillars at Gibraltar several times in his Histories. Critias places them near Gadeira, the Carthaginian port just beyond the blockaded mouth of the Mediterranean. (Pindar, the greatest of Greece’s lyric poets, wrote a century before Plato’s time, “Westward of Gadeira none may pass / Turn back ship’s tackle to Europe’s land!”) Plato likely heard Carthaginian propaganda in Syracuse, which would have emphasized the dangers of sailing beyond Gibraltar; it seems impossible that such tales would not also have been carried to a major seaport such as Athens.
What about the impassable muddy shoals mentioned by both Plato and Aristotle? The likeliest candidate is the sailing dead zone Herodotus described on the West African coast, citing the Carthaginians as his source. Stories filtering back eastward from this unknown territory could account for the blue vestments worn by the Atlantean kings (tinted with the indigo snail dye from the island of Mogador), as well as the elephants, which the Carthaginians first spotted in the coastal marshes near Senegal around 500 BC.
The last major item on my checklist was the most famous of all, the cataclysm that destroyed Atlantis. Many of the geologists and mythologists I’d spoken with equated the Thera explosion with the earthquakes and floods the Saïs priest describes. I suspect the Thera blast—and the Minoan Hypothesis—appeals to experts because there’s a great deal of physical evidence that something terrible happened. Since the effects of the disaster are still largely mysterious, specialists feel safe speculating there might be some connection between the Minoans and Plato’s story. But Plato took his catastrophism pretty seriously, and unlike Hesiod’s Theogony, there’s nothing in the Timaeus or Critias about volcanoes—no loud explosion, no magma boiling under the sea, no ash cloud, no volcanic lightning.
Unless there was a mix-up on the Egyptian end—admittedly, a possibility—Thera was most likely an accessory to the story of Atlantis’s sinking rather than the perpetrator: perhaps the cause of one of the three other great floods the priest mentions. Which means the experts who endorse the Minoan Hypothesis for Atlantis are probably mistaken.
Helike’s disappearance would have been another likely model for what Spyridon Marinatos called the “one fundamental fact” of the Atlantis story, that “a piece of land becomes submerged.” The sequence is identical—earthquake, flood, sinking—and unless Plato was deep in a cave testing ideas for the Republic, he must have heard about the disaster. I e-mailed Dora Katsonopoulou to check on her dig, which she confirmed was progressing—slowly. If the city buried there is half as wonderful as described in ancient accounts, Katsonopoulou will one day be as famous as Schliemann, and Helike will almost certainly supplant Santorini as the leading establishment candidate for Atlantis. (This is speculation, of course; the only absolute certainty is that its discovery will launch a thousand ships carrying cable-channel documentary crews.) But Helike was not at war with Athens, hadn’t conquered most of the Mediterranean, wasn’t anywhere near the various purported Pillars of Heracles, and certainly didn’t vanish prior to Solon’s visit to Egypt. Its destruction probably colored Plato’s account, and perhaps even reminded him of an old family story. But the event doesn’t seem to be his primary source.
If Atlantis were to be found on the basis of sheer enthusiasm, Anton Mifsud’s argument for Malta would be difficult to beat, yes? Yes! But the more I thought about it, the more his essential source, the manuscript from Eumalos of Cyrene, seemed just a little too convenient to be true—antiquity’s equivalent of a Scooby-Doo confession when Shaggy yanks off the villain’s monster mask. Malta has no mountains and hasn’t been attached to any sort of plain for a very long time, and while no one can say definitively what the cart ruts were (grooves worn by hauling sledges seems the most probable explanation), they definitely weren’t irrigation canals, unless Malta was also the original Lilliput. I would gladly let Dr. Mifsud remove my child’s appendix, but I can’t agree with his Atlantis conclusions.
Michael Hübner’s Morocco hypothesis was the most convincing on paper: the mountains matched perfectly; the spot where the Persian sailor Sataspes’s ships had stuck fast in the water—likely inspiration for the muddy shoals—was nearby. The location was not too far south
of the likeliest Pillars of Heracles. Even the name Gadir seemed to match. Once I subtracted the Pythagorean numbers from Plato’s story, though, Hübner’s logic instantly became less compelling. Like a beguiling online dating profile that fizzles at first sight, the precision of Hübner’s Seven Sigma correlations didn’t begin to match the real-world evidence. The ringed structure he found, while intriguing, sits several miles inland, in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, at an elevation that even Dallas Abbott’s six-hundred-foot-high Madagascar wave couldn’t reach.
In the end, my conclusion was inescapable. Plato stated pretty clearly where the island that Solon called Atlantis was located: Poseidon’s second son ruled over “the cape of the island facing the Pillars of Heracles opposite what is now called the territory of Gadeira,” or Gades/Cádiz. The Greeks were quite familiar with an island city in Gades: Tartessos, the trading port famous for its precious metals.
Tartessos is a good, if imperfect, match with Atlantis. The shiny orichalcum of Plato’s city could be related to the region’s famous copper and tin, which were mixed into Tartessian bronze. The Sierra Morena protect the Andalusian plains from northerly winds, and if they don’t fit exactly like a puzzle piece, as Stavros Papamarinopoulos suggests, they strongly resemble Plato’s description. The impassable mud shoals and elephants of Africa are close enough to Tartessos to have been co-opted into Carthaginian propaganda meant to dissuade curious Greeks from exploring the strange and dangerous world beyond the Pillars. The Azores-Gibraltar Transform Fault has demonstrated repeatedly its ability to unleash earthquakes and tsunamis that could wipe out a city overnight.
Are the concentric rings and temples of Atlantis buried under the sand and clay of Doñana National Park? I doubt it, no matter what Werner Wickboldt sees in his satellite photos. Such details seem like Platonic embellishments. Papamarinopoulos’s natural circular craters, while fascinating, are what Donald Rumsfeld would call known unknowns: They may have existed; if they did exist, they might help explain the rings of Atlantis; and if they were ever discovered, I’d be on the first plane to Seville to check them out. But they’re a long shot.
The biggest issue with identifying Tartessos as the original Atlantis is the date of its destruction. The city seems to have still existed in Solon’s time, disappearing from the historical record around 500 BC. Wickboldt suggests that the Tartessos known to the Greeks was built on top of the ruins of a destroyed Atlantis, or whatever the island was originally called. Papamarinopoulos has a similar idea, except he thinks the predecessor was an “elder prehistoric Tartessos,” one that now lies buried under the mud and clay of the Guadalquivir River. He believes the war between Athens and Atlantis may be a “parallel history within the turbulent twelfth century BC, unknown to science so far.” Considering what we know of the general chaos of the Sea Peoples era, that seems about as close to an explanation—and a date—as we can hope for without further evidence.
Because it is so entertaining and so different from his other writings, Plato’s tale of a lost city is often mistakenly dismissed as a one-off novelty created by an otherwise brilliant artist: philosophy’s answer to Bob Dylan’s Christmas album, with a little Athenian political theory sprinkled on top. Plato knew well the power of stories, which is why he used the account of Atlantis’s rise and fall as the bridge linking two of his most ambitious works. Having wrestled with some of the heaviest questions faced by humanity (What is knowledge? How does one lead a good life?), the Republic ends with Socrates telling the story of a soldier who learns the secrets of the human soul’s indestructibility and the circular design of the eternal cosmos. The Timaeus is Plato’s attempt to give a Pythagorean account of all that exists, from the tiniest triangular atom to the music of the spheres. The irresistible Atlantis story that Critias tells, with its enigmatic numbers and cyclical destructions, was—and still is—Plato’s invitation to engage in the only activity that could hope to make sense of it all: philosophy.
The question everyone wants answered about Atlantis is, was it real? If I may channel Plato for a moment, I guess that depends on the definition of real. I think Plato took elements of the Sea Peoples story that Solon heard in Egypt, combined them with stories about ancient Athens that had been passed down orally, and blended that with accounts he’d heard of a lost city beyond the Pillars of Heracles.
My conclusions were similar to those of Rainer Kühne, onetime believer in the historical Atlantis, who’d changed his mind after writing his Antiquity article to conclude that Plato’s story was fiction, based on some true events. Stavros Papamarinopoulos, using almost the same information, concluded that Plato’s story was a bricolage of true myths based in history, mixed in with some made-up stuff and mathematical codes. Werner Wickboldt, also employing a similar thought process, thought the Atlantis tale was more or less factual. You say Puh-lay-toh, I say Puh-lah-toh.
“Aren’t there two kinds of story, one true and the other false?” Socrates asks in the Republic. When discussing Atlantis, those usually seem to be the only two choices: Either Plato made it up, or he didn’t.
Plato loved mathematics because it provided definite answers, but his genius was demonstrating that everything else in the universe was worth taking a guess at, including the universe itself. After stating the binary nature of fact versus fiction in the Republic, Socrates concedes that there are stories that “are false, on the whole, though they have some truth in them.” At the risk of correcting the intellectual hero of the greatest philosopher who ever lived, I’d reverse that order. There are stories—“likely accounts,” in the words of Timaeus himself, clearing his throat before unleashing his wild cosmic speculations—that may contain some false information, though they are true on the whole.
Plato’s Atlantis story is one of them.
Plato, center left, with his prize pupil Aristotle, center right, from Raphael’s The School of Athens. In his left hand Plato holds a copy of the Timaeus, the original source of the Atlantis story. The seated figure, lower left, is generally believed to be Pythagoras. The tablet at his feet shows mystical numbers that influenced Plato’s writings. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Ignatius Donnelly, a US congressman and the author of history’s second-most-important work on Atlantis, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Tony O’Connell, founder of the online Atlantipedia and expert on all matters related to the lost city (Courtesy of Tony O’Connell)
Richard Freund, archeologist and star of the documentary Finding Atlantis, with a prehistoric Spanish concentric-circle stele (Courtesy of Associated Producers, Ltd.)
A speculative map from Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus (1666), often cited as evidence that ancient sailors voyaged to Atlantis (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
The pharaoh Ramses III repulses the invading Sea Peoples, as recorded in hieroglyphics at Medinet Habu, his mortuary temple in Egypt. (Rendering by Jean-François Champollion, courtesy of the author)
Rainer Kühne, the German physicist whose article in the journal Antiquity launched a new wave of searching for Atlantis (Courtesy of Associated Producers, Ltd.)
Juan Villarias-Robles, the Spanish historian and anthropologist whose multidisciplinary team investigated Kühne’s hypothesis (Courtesy of Juan Villarias-Robles)
The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 destroyed Portugal’s capital and echoed Plato’s description of Atlantis’s end—massive tremors followed by devastating floods. (Courtesy of the Jan T. Kozak Collection, NISEE)
George Nomikos on the island of Santorini, sometimes known by its former name, Thera (Courtesy of George Nomikos)
Santorini’s unique bull’s-eye shape and deep caldera have led some to believe the volcanic explosion that created it inspired Plato’s story. (Courtesy of George Nomikos)
Santorini’s ancient city of Akrotiri, discovered in 1967 under several meters of volcanic ash, bears striking similarity
to Plato’s description of Atlantis. (Courtesy of the author)
For a brief period in the 1960s, the search for Atlantis was treated as legitimate scientific news. (The New York Times, September 4, 1966)
Dr. Anton Mifsud believes he has found a twenty-three-hundred-year-old source that proves Atlantis was located in Malta. (Courtesy of Anton Mifsud)
The enormous canals Plato described in Atlantis may have been modeled on Malta’s mysterious ancient cart ruts. (Courtesy of the author)
The Strait of Gibraltar, which the ancient Greeks called the Pillars of Heracles—the end of the known world (Courtesy of Olaf Tausch/Wikimedia Commons)
The sixth-century BC Greek philosopher Pythagoras discovered the mathematical ratios behind musical harmonies, evidence that numbers were the hidden code of nature. (Courtesy of the author)
Details Plato gave about the ancient Acropolis in Athens, once believed fictional elements of the Atlantis story, were confirmed by twentieth-century archaeology. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Geophysics professor Stavros Papamarinopoulos, who has analyzed Plato’s use of myth and history in the Atlantis tale for more than forty years (Courtesy of Stavros Papamarinopoulos)
